Strymon PCH

This pedalboard‑friendly DI interface has been designed specifically for interfacing amp modellers and electronic instruments with PA and recording systems.

Even in today’s ever more high‑tech live‑sound world, a guitar player arriving at any gig with a ‘provided PA’ is most likely to find that the engineer’s default option will be a single line to front‑of‑house and an SM57 to place in front of the speaker. All well and good if you’ve turned up with a conventional guitar amp — you’ll be a mono source arriving at the console at the expected ‘mic level’. Not so good, however, if you’ve brought a digital amp modeller and pedalboard loaded with your lovingly crafted stereo effects. What usually happens then is that the 57 gets somewhat reluctantly swapped for a single‑channel DI box and the engineer departs without answering your questions about what kind of level you should be sending...

Amp modellers are usually capable of outputting a very wide range of levels, from a hot ‘pro’ line level down to mic‑ or passive instrument level, and may have anything from balanced XLR or TRS sockets to unbalanced TS jacks. You might imagine that you’d always be pretty safe with a nice, strong line‑level signal on balanced XLRs that you can connect directly to any stagebox, but there’s still plenty that can go wrong in that scenario. The chances are that the stagebox will connect to the mic inputs on the console, with line‑level signals expected to be handled either with a separate TRS input, or maybe just a pad switch to drop the sensitivity of the mic inputs. It’s also sadly true that not all XLR‑equipped modellers can deal with being sent phantom power, and not all PA consoles have phantom power switchable per channel.

On the whole, you are often better off just playing safe and using a DI box that will drop your modeller’s signal down to mic level... except not all DI boxes are created equal! You could be clipping the DI box before your signal even gets to the console, and if you’ve taken a split to a local monitor from before the DI, you won’t even know that your FOH sound is compromised.

Who Needs A ‘Specialised’ DI...